Redwood City, CA: NeXT missed its April 1 deadline for delivery of beta copies of NeXTSTEP 3.0 to third-party developers. The company now expects to deliver the prerelease software later in the month, about three weeks late.

Despite the delay, however, NeXT contends NeXTSTEP's 3.0 final release is still on track for the second quarter, though some industry insiders and developers doubt that the company will make its self-imposed deadline.

In other NeXTSTEP news, NeXT revealed in March that NeXTSTEP 3.0's built-in support for reading and writing Macintosh floppy disks will be based on the popular FloppyWorks program from Digital Instrumentation Technology (DIT).

"They built it into the kernel," said Jeff Lawrence, DIT's marketing manager. Because it is in the kernel, users of NeXTSTEP 3.0 won't be forced to access their Macintosh floppy disks through a separate application program.

"Access to Macintosh data by NeXT users is a basic need that really belongs in the system software," said Lawrence. FloppyWorks will continue to be sold as a separate product.